Can anything positive be taken out of experiencing anxiety? It really depends on who you ask. Jonathan was a tall young man in just about his mid-twenties when he saw me to speak about a few of the things that he'd been having trouble with lately. Although he seemed to have everything going for him in terms of having a steady job in the Melbourne CBD, a vibrant social life, and support from many of those around him he spoke to me about his sporadic bouts with daily stresses.
I asked him whether, in his experience, anxiety had ever amounted to anything positive. He replied by saying he couldn't think of a time that it had. He seemed to be struck with anxious thoughts "out of nowhere". He'd look around and feel himself sweating when it wasn't hot. When he felt stumped in terms of approaching a girl while out with his mates, he'd feel himself getting anxious. It was something that wasn't a positive experience, and something he would like to see expelled from himself.
So can we actually take something positive out of anxiety? I hear you intuitively saying 'Yes Emil, or else why would you have posted this?' Well I think you're quite right. I think that although 'anxiety' can be understood as, to some, the bane of their existence, others frequently draw the positives given their experience. How so? Well I'll have to define what I'm talking about when I speak about anxiety before I can answer that...
So what is 'anxiety'?
Well, what you might be thinking when you're reading this the daily stresses of everyday life. The anxious waiting for the bus to board the train you need so that you can get to work in time and do what you need to do. If the bus doesn't arrive in time, we start to overthink. We sometimes get 'automatic thoughts' (I'll be late, I'll get in trouble) which bug us, sometimes won't leave us alone in that instance, and are only relieved when the thoughts are presented with evidence against what we're thinking (e.g. you might stop thinking you'll lose your job when you find out that the bus you usually take was replaced by another one that is coming 3 minutes later and can get you to your workplace quicker).
Normal Anxiety is understood as a sense of anxiety experienced when one reacts appropriately to daily life circumstances (missing a bus and getting anxious; Iacovou, 2011). It's not too pervasive or debilitating.
Existential Anxiety is something that's understood as the "inevitable unease" of being aware of your freedom, your own self, and "the finitude of human existence" (van Deurzen, 2002, p. 34; Iacovou, 2011, p. 358). What's that mean? When you're aware that you're going to die one day, that you're free to do what you want, but are restrained in a sense by certain things that are over your head (the legal system, biological sex, etc.), and so on. It's the awareness of the bigger things in life that some of us constantly ignore as being there.
Finally, Neurotic Anxiety is what happens to us when we ignore the Existential Anxiety presented above. We don't come to terms with the fact that we'll die one day. We won't accept that we're actually free. We'll deny our (relative) separateness from others and the outside world. This is where we "attempt to detoxify and replace Existential Anxiety" (Iacovou, 2011, p. 359).
So now that we've come to terms with the terms we can attempt to understand the relationship between the various Anxieties and their usefulness (or lack thereof) in our daily lives.
Once we understand that there are certain 'givens' in life (we all die; we're all - at bottom - by ourselves; we all have a freedom of choosing what we want to do; we all have the responsibility to choose rightly; we all have a sense of 'meaning'; etc.) we can embrace them and live our lives accordingly.
When we run away from acknowledging these 'givens' we are lead to stagnation. When we examine them and understand our relationship to them we can enrich our lives and thus enlarge ourselves!
For example, I've heard it said that only when you understand that you're dying you can truly live. When we ignore this predicament we can't expect to be authentic people. We're living a lie, and when we're confronted with this fact of life, we don't really know how to deal with it. So many have said when they're suffering and dying of cancer they truly see the meaning in their lives. Yalom (2002) notes that when he was working with patients facing death he heard many of them lament 'But what a pity that we had to wait until now, until our bodies are riddled with cancer, to learn how to live' (p. 130).
When handled properly anxiety can help people discover ways to use their special talents or their sensitivity to anxiety to negotiate anxiety successfully (van Deurzen, 2002; & Taylor, 1995; as cited in Iacovou, 2011).
When we avoid life's disturbing realities we cannot really appreciate what we are living for. Speaking with an Israeli-born psychotherapist the other day I was confronted with the usefulness and non-usefulness of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) in attempting to rid a client of anxiety. It's useful because it will help alleviate the symptoms by recognising the automatic thoughts that appear when confronted with a distressing stimuli and in turn allow the client to employ other ways of thinking about the situation. But it's not effective because it rarely gets to the root of the problem. It might alleviate a certain way of thinking, but what happens to the reason they're thinking like that?
So many compounding factors may be responsible for someone not filling in their forms adequately. Only when we understand what makes us react the way we do; understand the larger themes and events in our lives and react accordingly can we attempt to handle our anxieties in a more proactive way.
This does not do anything at all to discount the amount of hurt people experience when they're suffering from anxious thoughts. It's merely a brief dissertation on the prominence of major themes that run through every persons life that could contribute in helping the person understand their predicament with more lucidity.
I'll say again, Only when we understand we're truly dying can we really live. And to add to that, Only when we understand our predicament and realise its larger than ourselves can we truly appreciate where to go with our lives.
References
Iacovou, S. (2011). What is the difference between existential anxiety and so called neurotic anxiety? Existential Analysis, 22(2), 356-367.
Yalom, I. D. (2002). The gift of therapy. London, UK: Piatkus
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